National Library of Scotland

The Mickel Fund’s generous donation has served as a catalyst to enable the work of the Scottish Screen Archive to move forward in a most satisfactory way.
The donation allowed us to employ an assistant curator to work on the extensive appraisal backlog in acquisitions at the Scottish Screen Archive (SSA). This post also required training to handle original film material.

From the beginning of April 2013 the assistant curator was the first person to appraise and analyse a large collection of agricultural training films which had been donated by the National Museum of Scotland. This collection includes training films used to promote new farming techniques mostly dating from the later 1930’s until 1950. The films were mainly produced by the Agricultural College at the University of Edinburgh. One of the highlights discovered in this collection was a colour film of the Women’s Land Army at training at Craibstone 1939-1944.

During the period the assistant was employed they repaired, viewed, and appraised 160 films and videos which totalled 63,189ft, over 61 hours of footage. Due to the age and physical condition of the reels it was necessary for the assistant curator to closely inspect and repair each reel prior to viewing which is very time consuming and labour intensive.

In 2016, further funding was used to create The Mickel Room at NLS’s new state of the art Kelvin Hall facility. The Mickel Room is a special viewing suite that allows visitors to view a large collection of the NLS’s archived film footage.